The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,14

do. Having shot the bolt, she began to open the door.

Tycho was inside before she realised, his hand over her mouth as he positioned himself behind her. At most, she’d have seen a white-clad figure flow ghostlike through the half-darkness. Blowing out the cheap candle she clutched, he felt bitter smoke fill his nostrils. When she stopped struggling, he took his hand from her mouth. “You know why I’m here.”

“Riccardo?”

“Is dead.”

“No . . .”

“You know it’s true.”

She did, too. It was in the slump of her shoulders and sag of her body. For a moment she tensed, glancing longingly at the door, then hope leached from her. “Will they torture me first?”

Had she been able to write she could have made no clearer confession. Although Tycho was uncertain what she confessed to. That she would help murder the baby she nursed felt wrong. “It will be a quick death.”

“Thank you . . .”

Such resignation. “How could you agree?”

Francesca opened her mouth and shut it. She had typically Venetian features, wide-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a strong nose. In another life the woman might have been pretty; in this she was cheaply dressed and heavy dugged from years of giving milk to other people’s children. Her husband had died quickly. He had no way of knowing his wife would be offered that luxury and had risked her life anyway. “You didn’t think you’d be discovered?”

“My husband was always Prince Alonzo’s man.”

So Alexa had been right. “But you fell ill because your husband told you to? And he changed his shift at Alonzo’s orders?”

She shrugged. “My man came and went.”

And how would I know which guard shift he pulled? Tycho could read the question in the flatness of her tone. He had a question of his own. “You knew Prince Leo was to be murdered?”

“What?”

“Stabbed through the heart,” Tycho said. “Your replacement gutted. The nursery looks like an abattoir and stinks like a mortuary. I found the child you fed lying dead beneath his upturned cot.”

Twisting free, she put her hands over her ears, refusing to hear any more.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no.”

Pulling her hands away, Tycho said. “That wasn’t meant to happen?”

“Of course not.” Francesca shook her head fiercely. “Prince Alonzo wanted the child with him so that Mongol bitch couldn’t corrupt the boy. That’s what my husband told me. The Regent wanted to keep Leo safe . . . He’s really dead?”

“I saw the body.”

“What will happen to my child?”

A slaughter for a slaughter? There were undoubtedly cities and rulers who worked like this. Alexa was more complex and her responses less simple. “He will be looked after. A new family will be found.”

It was a half-truth. Leo’s body would be buried quietly. The slaughtered nurse would simply disappear. A new room would become Leo’s nursery and a new nurse found for the new Leo, who would remain Giulietta’s child for as long as it took Alexa to decide what should be done.

“Where is your child?”

“Sleeping.” Francesca indicated the darkness behind.

Wooden internal walls, tar paper across the windows, a cheap pine table and two stools. A pile of hay in one corner for a goat brought in from a tiny yard outside. The building would burn readily enough.

“He will be safe,” Tycho promised.

“And me . . .?

She was not the cause, Tycho reminded himself. Reaching up, he put his hand to her cheek and turned her face until she faced him. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “Look into my eyes and don’t look away.” Her pupils grew huge and fell out of focus. Her eyelids fluttered as she reached the edge of sleep and he felt her body begin to slump. She would have fallen but he caught her, his dog teeth descending as he bit into the nape of her neck.

As always, the world fell into sharp focus. Had he gone outside the sky would have been blood-red, the stars hard and distant worlds he could freeze into his memory in a single glance. And he would have seen the stars, because they would have been points of heat through the cold of the clouds.

He was Fallen. The reality of that fact he only remembered now. At other times, he knew it in an abstract way. Here and now, with blood in his throat and flames flaring from him in colours the human eye couldn’t capture he understood what it meant. This world was not his world. These people were not his people. Except for him, he doubted his